“‘First Cow’ Is A Necessary Portrait Of Platonic Male Affection”

The start of a new franchise. Better get a ticket now before “Second Cow” and “Third Cow” go into production. Continue reading →

Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass, 2016, dir. James Bobin

I probably don’t need to tell you at this point that Alice Through the Looking Glass is a pretty bad movie. I also don’t really want to tell you about it, because I’ve already dedicated enough ink to the film as it is, and even my 900 word take-down of the sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 surprise … Continue reading →

Review: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, 2011, dir. Steven Spielberg

(Cross-posted over at GoSeeTalk.) While watching The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, you can feel Spielberg grinning happily on the other side of the camera. It’s a welcome quality; adapting Hergé’s beloved comic books to screen in the first of a planned series of films with collaborator Peter Jackson seems to have brought … Continue reading →

Review: Captain America: The First Avenger, 2011, dir. Joe Johnston

To call Captain America: The First Avenger “perfect” would be something of an overstatement– the opening scene serves absolutely no appreciable purpose whatsoever for the movie’s narrative, and the denouement gets a little choppy and falters in set-up and execution. The unsavory frames of film that bookend what you could call Joe Johnston’s masterpiece (with … Continue reading →

2011 Rising: My Films to Watch (pt.2)

Part 2 of my 2011 preview commences…now! (Part 1 can be perused here, at your leisure.) X-Men: First Class— By happy coincidence, the first trailer for Matthew Vaughn’s period prequel to the X-Men franchise hit just last week, and guess what? It looks really good. Focusing specifically on the relationship between Erik Lehnsherr, the man … Continue reading →

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (pt.1), 2010, dir. David Yates

The end has come, but not really so much at all, no. Seeing the first half of the two-part finale to the Harry Potter saga, I can fully appreciate the artistic need to break the book apart; even more, I can better admire J.K. Rowling’s gargantuan, overstuffed seventh novel and the scope of both the … Continue reading →